Berliner Professor envisions blood vessel growth as therapy

Michael Simons, M.D., recently appointed the Robert W. Berliner Professor of Medicine, is a leading researcher on angiogenesis—the growth of new blood vessels—in cardiovascular diseases.

Simons came to Yale in 2008 as chief of the Department of Internal Medicine’s Section of Cardiovascular Medicine at the School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital.

His research interests include fibroblast growth factor signaling in the vascular system, regulation of arterial development and branching, and endothelial signaling. He is developing strategies to deliver and assess various biological agents—genes, proteins, antibodies, and receptor “traps”—and in identifying and validating novel biomarkers that predict individual responses to therapies. He has been an advocate for using biological therapies to stimulate new vessel growth to improve circulation in damaged regions of the heart or in blood-deprived limbs.

Before coming to Yale, Simons was the A.G. Huber Professor of Medicine, and professor of pharmacology and toxicology, at Dartmouth Medical School. He was also chief of cardiology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the director of its Cardiovascular Center.

Simons received his M.D. from Yale in 1984. He was a resident in internal medicine at New England Medical Center, Boston, and a medical staff fellow and postdoctoral fellow at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health. He completed a fellowship in cardiology at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an associate scientist in the Program for Excellence in Molecular Biology of the Cardiovascular System.